Hillary on 2016: I won the places that aren’t looking backwards

AllahpunditPosted at 5:31 pm on March 12, 2018

If you think she means “backwards” strictly in economic terms, consider that this is how she summarizes Trump’s message:

You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are — whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.

After all the brutal polling about how unlikable she is, all of the analysis about how poor her campaign strategy was, all of the reporting about her party’s disastrous disinterest in competing for working-class white votes in the belief that the Obama coalition was insuperable and unbreakable, her theory for why she lost still boils down to one word: Deplorables. There are too damned many backwards deplorables from places that aren’t “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” That’ll come as news to Texans, Georgians, and North Carolinians (never mind Floridians and Pennsylvanians), to name just three red, diverse, dynamic states that went for Trump two years ago.

I don’t think this is some arcane, embittered view that Hillary is clinging to in order to soothe herself over her defeat, though. I think this is liberal orthodoxy, part of the red/blue divide. The country is trapped in a toxic marriage that can’t end in divorce, so the two parties forge on thinking the worst of each other and trying to talk to each other as little as possible. A Clinton might understandably be more comfortable articulating that dynamic than most people are.

This wasn’t the only gross thing she said at this event, either. Click here and watch her once again try to blame the fact that she lost white women on “pressure” by the men in their lives. Quote: “Part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.” She made that same point back in September. She really seems to have convinced herself that white women who preferred Trump succumbed to a kind of soft intimidation effort by their male relatives, unable to muster the strength of will and independent-mindedness that women of other races evinced. Imagine Trump suggesting that minority women backed Hillary because they were too softheaded to resist the influence from husbands, fathers, and brothers. It’d be page one for a week.